Chapter Twenty
_____________________
______________________________________________________
“TURN HERE!”COLTONyelled at Zeb.
They took the curve into the subdivision at seventy, throwing Colton against the passenger door but he barely registered the pain.
Shelby.
I have to save her.
From the backseat, Connor handed him a gun. “You might need this.”
Colton took the Sig, gripping the stock hard. Beatrice had called to tell him Shelby wasn’t answering her calls. Then she’d told him about the fingerprint match, the shoes traced to Paris and a very unlikely customer. To top it off, she’d told him what Emit’s TrackMap had found—the relationship it discovered that, with the other evidence, revealed the killer.
The fucking bastard had been in front of him the whole bloody time. Setting up Shelby. Setting up all of them.
Shelby must have figured it out too, even without all the fancy tech. She’d drawn the serial killer away from the hospital and the people she loved, and knowing her, thought she could stop him on her own.
Jon was down. Beatrice had patched them through to Shelby’s open cell phone line, allowing Colton and the others to hear everything going on in his house while their end was muted.
Tell Colton I love him.
She was about to die and those were her final words.
Fucking A.
“Two more blocks, then the last road,” he told Zeb. “Hurry.”
Zeb was an expert driver and was going as fast as the rental car could handle, but Colton wished he could yank the wheel away and drive himself.
“Who are you really?” he heard Theo say.
Daniel—or whoever he was—answered. “I’ve been many men in my lifetime. The real me is dead and buried.”
Theo snorted. “How did you know it was me?”
“I wasn’t sure until tonight. Until you shot that bodyguard.”
“Wait.” Shelby’s voice was angry. “You did all of this, Theo? You killed those men?”
Did she really not know or was she playing dumb?
“Nice of Daniel, here, to become my scapegoat.” Ingram.
Fucking creep. Assistant In Charge Theo Ingram had played them all.
So had Daniel from the sounds of it, but Colton wasn’t sure exactly how.
Lights from the car behind them flashed in the side mirror. Shelby had known she was flushing out the killer and she’d at least been smart enough to alert Denbe and Jocelyn from her office. They were right behind Zeb’s rental.
“Light,” Connor said, handing Colton a flashlight to clip onto his gun.
And it was his. Connor had somehow retrieved it from the cops when Colton had gone belly up.
Thank God someone had his back.